"The central doctrine of Christianity, then, is not that God is a bastard. It is, in the words of the late Dominican theologian Herbert McCabe, that if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you."--Terry Eagleton

"It is impossible for me to say in my book one word about all that music has meant in my life. How then can I hope to be understood?--Ludwig Wittgenstein

“The opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice."--Bryan Stevenson

Sunday, March 13, 2011

Idle unsustainable thought

In the oft-imagined future, the world we will live in is never re-shaped by natural disasters. All the lingering effects that create dystopia or apocalypse are always imagined as man-made. No one envisions the effect of an 8.9 earthquake that shifts an island 8 feet eastward and affects the tilt of the earth's axis.

We have become as gods since the Industrial Revolution, and we still aren't comfortable with it. When the earthquake destroyed Lisbon, 18th century Europe was shaken to its deistic core, and blamed God for no longer being God, or no longer being benevolent (how could such bad things happen to such good people?) We no longer think that way, but every time we envision the future in our fiction, it is bleak, inhumane, and human-created.

Natural disasters that destroy whole cities and reshape the land, never seem to be that critical. Perhaps we don't like to be reminded that we are not in control, even as we fear we are.